AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)

Dealing with organizational change is a challenge in today’s fast-paced business environment. Long gone are the days when employees stayed with companies until retirement. The mindset of many employees is to move around to different companies for a promotion, a better salary, or new challenging opportunities. Managing organizational change in terms of user access is becoming more and more complex due to the changing technology landscape. With systems being accessible over the network, IT shops can’t just deny ex-employees physical access to the building, but have to cut their credentials to the network as well. With the proliferation of cloud technologies this can become even more of a challenge because your digital assets are accessible over the internet from anywhere in the world. In many technology centric companies managing login credentials and access are paramount for securing the assets of the business and coping with organizational change.

To solve this problem AWS has a service called Identity and Access Management (IAM). IAM is an AWS feature that allows you to regulate use and access to AWS resources. With IAM you can create and manage users and groups for access to your AWS environment. IAM also gives you the ability to assign permissions to the users and groups to allow or deny access. With IAM you can assign users access keys, passwords and even Multi Factor Authentication devices to access your AWS environment. IAM on AWS even allows you to manage access with federated users, a way to configure access using credentials that expire and are manageable through traditional corporate directories like Microsoft Active Directory.

With IAM you can set permissions based on AWS provided policy templates like “Administrator Access” which allows full access to all AWS resources and services, “Power User Access” which provides full access to all AWS resources and services but does not allow access to managing users and groups, or even “Read Only Access”. These policies can be applied to users and groups. Some policy templates provided can limit users to use certain services like the policy template, “Amazon EC2 Full Access” or “Amazon EC2 Read Only Access”, which gives a user full access to EC2 via the AWS management console and read only access to EC2 via the AWS management console respectively.

IAM also allows you to set your own policies to manage permissions. Say you wanted an employee to be able to just start and stop instances you can use the IAM Policy Generator to create a custom policy to do just that. You would select the effect, Allow or Deny, the specific service, and the action. IAM also gives you the ability to layer the permissions on top of each other by adding additional statements to the policy.

Once you create a policy you can apply it to any user or group and it automatically takes effect. When something changes in the organization, like an employee leaving, AWS IAM simplifies management of access and identity by allowing you to just delete the user or policy attached to that user. If an employee moves from one group to another it is easy to reassign the user to a different group with the appropriate access level. As you can see the variety of policy rules is extensive, allowing you to create very fine grained permissions around your AWS resources and services.

Another great thing about IAM is that it’s a free service that comes with every AWS account, it is surprising to see how many people overlook this powerful tool. It is highly recommended to always use IAM with any AWS account. It gives you the ability to have an organized way to manage users and access to your AWS account and simplifies the management nightmare of maintaining access controls as the environment grows.